While certainly isn't a bad piece of work by any means, the third in the "Back to the Future" trilogy still has a rather "was this trip really necessary?" feel to it. Made at the same time as the second picture, this film does thankfully feel a bit more dissimilar than the others, but it doesn't do a whole lot with its new setting.

As you may or may not recall from the second film (I wouldn't recommend watching them out of order, either), Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) had fixed the trouble he'd cause in his future (2015), by heading back to the past (1955) and fixing things for his present (1985). While I don't want to reveal all of the details of the end of that film, the picture closes with Marty getting a letter from Doc Brown, who is satisfied with his current (er, past) life in the 1800's.

Marty does find where Doc hid the DeLorean all those years prior, but after doing some additional research, he finds that Doc gets killed a week after he wrote the letter to Marty. In an attempt to save his friend, Marty travels backwards instead of forward. The remainder of the picture has Marty and Doc trying to figure out a way to save the both of them and get them - you guessed it - back to the future, even though Doc has fallen for a local woman named Clara (Mary Steenburgen).

The third film was right in theory to go to the West - it's an unusual setting that's far different than anything we've encountered in the prior two films. Unfortunately, nothing in the Old West is that terribly exciting - we're mostly offered some fairly bland, rather stereotypical elements from other Western pictures, only this time with the added layer of having Marty and Doc once again trying to figure out how the hell to fix the time machine in a time when it seems otherwise impossible. The romance between the Steenburgen and Lloyd characters is also fairly weak and seemingly unimportant. Given that this is the most thinly plotted of the three pictures, it also seems strange that it has the longest running time of the three, at a couple minutes short of two hours. Some editing down of the Western scenes could certainly have picked up the pace, athough that would not have solved all of this film's problems.

One thing that isn't lost here is the fact that Fox and Lloyd still do make a great team and both do offer fine performances once again. The third film is a nice try, but it's just not always entirely successful with what's an otherwise decent idea. Good ending, though.

Although an additional film wouldn't be a half-bad idea if Gale and Zemeckis could come up with another idea (and given the advances in visual effects). Maybe the series would be best left as is, but I still miss this kind of filmmaking - these kinds of adventures just aren't made anymore and seem to have ended largely with the early 90's.